Suppose your friendly Yellow Pages salesperson said to you, “I’m willing to put any ad you want on as many pages as you want, and the only time you have to pay me is when someone goes to your website”.

Would you be interested in a deal like that? Well, that is what Pay-Per-Click advertising is like. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and is delivered to your web site. And remember what the Yellow Pages salesperson said about “on as many pages as you like”? Well, today if you advertise in the Yellow Pages, you are probably under one or maybe two categories or headings. With Search Engine Marketing, you can be under as many “categories” as you feel are appropriate for your business. These are called “keywords” or “keyword phrases”.

Perhaps a question & answer forum will help…

“But I already pay someone do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make sure I am highly ranked for my keywords. ”If they are doing SEO, then here are some things to consider:

Making your website “search engine friendly” is not the same as search engine optimization. There is a really big difference.

Your SEO campaign is probably limited to a relatively small number of keywords that are applicable to your business. PPC offers an unlimited number of keywords.

What is displayed in the search results is likely a chopped up collection of words from a page on your site. It isn’t a compelling marketing message with a call to action that SELLS!

It typically takes 3-6 months for the search engines to identify any changes to your site and then “re-index” your site for the new keywords. Changing or adding keywords with PPC takes a matter of minutes.

If your serve a national market, then using SEO in conjunction with PPC is a viable strategy. However, if you are a small business serving a local market then SEO alone is limited in what it will do for you. For example, you can’t geographically target the audience unless you include the name of the city in the keyword. If you perform SEO on the keyword “real estate agent”, you are “optimizing” for the entire country and competing against everyone else who optimizes for that keyword.

If your employee or contractor is using techniques the search engines forbid, your site could get permanently banned! For many businesses, their brand, company name or web site URL, is very valuable to them and loosing the ability to be found using a search engine would have a traumatic effect on their on-line presence.

“Why can’t my IT person or web developer do this?”

I can’t count the number of times a prospect has come to me after they have let their web developer create and manage their AdWords account. In most cases the person was very good at web development and said, “sure, I know how to use AdWords”. The thing is, AdWords is deceptively simply, but devilishly complex. Almost anyone with basic computer skills can open an AdWords account and drive traffic to a website. However, doing it in a way that produces an optimal ROI is quite another thing. But for the sake of discussion, let’s assume her or she….

Has some knowledge of search engine marketing

Has some experience with Pay-Per-Click

Has extensive experience with the major search engine paid search programs and is up-to-date

Has the software tools necessary to perform the keyword research and on-going maintenance

Has done the research to know what keywords will perform well in your industry, in your industry segment and in your local area

Has the time to devote to this effort on a priority basis

Then assuming they have other duties and their time has value, you will probably be paying them more than I would charge. And if they are not at least as effective as I am, you won’t be getting a good return on your investment!

“Where will my ad appear and what will it look like?” While I work with several different “search providers”, by far the most effective is Google AdWords. If you go to www.Google.com and search for a product or service, you will be able to see in a pink shaded area on the top and down the right-hand side of the screen, a list of “Ads”. This is where your ad would appear. Try it, and see what it looks like. Google is the most popular search engine and your ad could appear for as many keywords as you would like.

Let me begin with the fundamental premise that creating any successful advertising campaign, whether it be AdWords or a magazine ad, requires testing and constant fine-tuning. No one ever gets it exactly right the first time.

Whether it be a client’s campaign or one I’m developing for them, the first implementation of an ad group provides valuable information about the market niche you are trying to penetrate. Once you reach the point where you have statistically significant data, you can develop a plan for taking it to the next level.

When the first batch of data becomes available, which could take three days or three months to gather, depending on the number of clicks you receive, you have an idea about the amount of traffic (impressions & clicks) for an individual keyword and the all-important Google AdWords quality score.

If you find yourself in a situation where you have a keyword that:

correctly describes your product or service

cannot be further specified by attaching adjectives that make it more precise without receiving the dreaded status of “Low search volume”

and still have a very low (2-4) quality score

you have a real challenge with limited options.

Most advertisers who find themselves in this predicament want to improve the quality score because:

their ad is not displaying at all (quality score of 0-1) or

their ad is receiving reduced impressions (quality score of 3-6) or

is resulting in an exorbitant CPC (quality score of 2-4).

Chances are, you find yourself in this position because Google has determined that very few, if any advertisers are able to produce a consistently good user experience for that keyword. By this I mean that the metrics Google uses to rate user experiences (CTR, bounce rate, number of pages visited, time on your website, etc.) are relatively low. And in most cases, the reason they are low is because the keyword phrase is very broad. Meaning it is used by a wide range of user interests and therefore it appeals to no one.

When this happens, the reason Google provides is that the quality score you are given for that keyword is most heavily influenced by “how well that keyword has performed throughout the Google system”. This condition can account for as much as 60% of the quality score you receive! It is the largest single component.

In this situation, there are only a few things you can do, with none of them being all that easy or inexpensive. Plus, there will be no guarantee they will make a significant impact, at least in the short-term.

If you do decide to take action, here are the steps I recommend:

Determine which keywords have sufficient search volume to warrant their own ad group.

Create separate ad groups for each one of those keywords and perform additional research to insure you have a full complement of negative keywords. This will ultimately help improve your CTR.

Insure a high degree of relevance between the keyword and the ad copy headline.

Once the new ad groups and landing pages are in place, bid to rank in the number two position.

Here is why you want your ads to appear in the “top” positions, meaning they appear over the organic search results. The CTR of a keyword when it appears in the top position can be many times more than when it appears in the right-hand column or what google calls the “other” position. To see what I mean, run a “Segment” report and chose “Top vs. Other”. You might be surprised.

The single biggest component of keyword quality score is CTR, and in this case, where your performance is being overwhelmingly influenced by “how well that keyword has performed throughout the Google system”, you must demonstrate significantly better CTR performance than the other advertisers. I believe that metric is somewhere in the range of 5% CTR or better.

Having a successful search engine advertising campaign is a blend of art and science. The science part is discussed in another one of my articles titled AdWords optimized website design, where I talk about conforming to Google’s best practices in order to maximize keyword and landing page quality scores. Implementing these practices will help increase the chances of your ad being displayed for any given search query and then achieving a higher ad ranking or a lower CPC.

The purpose of this article is to explain the art of landing page optimization and the importance of understanding the unique characteristics of visitors from search engines, whether from organic or paid search. AdWords is about what happens before the click and landing page optimization is about what happens after the click! Both are critically important elements of a successful online direct-response advertising campaign.

Most advertisers I come in contact with struggle knowingly or unknowingly with one important principle of online marketing, understanding the unique characteristics of prospects from search engines. Visitors from search engines are different from other visitors and your website, especially your landing page, must take this into account if you are going to have a successful PPC campaign.

When we meet someone in person, we can size up the situation by assessing their appearance, body language and listening to what they say and how they say it. But with online marketing, we have to rely on technology, images and text. I like to think of the process as a chain, and this chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If any link breaks, we lose the prospect and the resources we invested getting them to that point. See my article titled A chain of success.

Unlike someone who comes to your website after speaking with you on the phone, being referred by a friend or having read a brochure, search visitors know nothing about you, your product or your company until the moment they click on your ad and hit your landing page.

Visitors from search engines have certain characteristics you must take into consideration if you hope to maximize your chances of getting them to take action. Here are a few things to consider:

Visitors from search engines have very little patience. From the time they click on your ad and hit your landing page, you have 3-5 seconds to make a connection. If you don’t, they will bounce. Meaning they will leave your website and probably won’t be back! But you will have still paid the price of a click for that visit, which only lasted a few seconds.

They are cynical, skeptical and have very high expectations. The quality of your site directly reflects on you and your company. If the graphics are not of the highest quality, if the text isn’t clear and compelling, if the navigation isn’t intuitive, their interest will wane and they will leave!

Visitors from search engines don’t read web pages, they scan them. If they don’t immediately see what they were looking for, they need a way to easily, efficiently and intuitively navigate your website to find it.

Internet search prospects are inherently price shoppers. If you are not prepared to compete on price, you need to have a very compelling value proposition.

The actual design of a landing page will be unique for every company and ideally for every product, but there are some basic, time-tested principals that pre-date the internet, yet still apply to landing page optimization. The principals I use are discussed in my post titled The A.I.D.A. formula for landing page design.

The amount of time and effort you invest in this process will be unique to your situation and should be evaluated based on the potential return. However, serious online, direct-response marketers spend enormous amounts of time on this, and for good reason. Even a small percentage improvement in conversions can mean a significant increase in leads, sales and profit.

An internet advertiser goes through many phases in their quest to maximize return on investment for their website. This is an indication of how their thought process matures and what they can actually do to improve the ROI.

I want more business – Those who are unfamiliar with internet search advertising usually see it as a new channel, meaning another way to acquire prospects they can convert into customers. Without the benefit of understanding all the various intricacies, processes, technology, etc., they are focused on the end result, more customers. They understand the need for a website and realize that search advertising is a way for people who use search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), to find their website, out of the literally millions of other websites on the internet.

I want more visitors to my web site – Because being found by the search engines and appearing high enough in the ranking, typically on the first page, seemed relatively easy using AdWords, they naively equate more website visitors with more business. Initially, they are very encouraged by the sudden increase of website traffic and they are already beginning to count the money that they expect to be rolling in. But this increased traffic comes with a cost and then they begin to realize that more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more business.

I want better qualified visitors to my site – Either through their own hands-on experience or through on-going discussions with their campaign manager, they come to appreciate that all visitors are not equal. Unless the initial selection of keywords is extremely well chosen, there will be only a fraction of visitors that actually turn into suspects, then suspects into prospects and prospects into customers. The unfortunate reality is that search engine users don’t read ads, they scan them. Especially if your ad is near the top position, users simply click the higher ads and then decide once they see the website, if they want to stay. But you already paid for that click!

I want to know what visitors are doing when they visit my site – Just like a store owner who wants to see why a seemingly competent sales person isn’t bringing in sales, even while they are spending all this time with prospects, they will want to know as much as they can about visitors that are coming to their website, especially if they are paying to bring them there. This is why analytics and conversion tracking are so important.

I don’t want those kind of visitors, but I do want these kind – Fortunately, technology provides us with tools (web analytics & conversion tracking) that allow us to gather and report information about website visitors. We can see things like, what search engine referred the visitor, what search query they used, what keyword in their campaign was triggered, what pages they visited and what actions they took, like downloading a coupon or buying something! Once we know what keywords perform well and which ones don’t, we can take appropriate steps to eliminate or encourage certain visitors to the site.

I want visitors to take some action when they visit my site – The best way to categorize visitors is through their behavior and the best way to understand their behavior is to give them something to do when they visit your site. The more things you can track, the more things you can assign a value to. Once you know what keywords lead to which actions, then you can begin to monetize keywords and visitor behavior.

I want visitors to take a specific action when they visit my site – Once the keywords and visitor actions are prioritized and monetized, then you can begin managing the process! Now you are ready to appreciate my article on PPC Implementation Strategies.

I am willing to pay this much for that type of visitor – When you can assign a value to a specific type of visitor and you have enough historical data on that type of visitor, then you can determine just how much you are willing to spend to get them. Now you are able to look at the process as an investment. You invest this much in a process and get this much out. And remember, search advertising Google AdWords) is the fastest direct response marketing mechanism ever developed. You can adjust your campaign in a matter of minutes!

Most people who use Google AdWords don’t have a good understanding of the display network. In fact, many AdWords advertisers have unknowingly spent a considerable amount of their daily budgets on the display network and were not even aware of it because the default setting in AdWords is set to enable it, something Google has received a lot of criticism for. Advertisers often don’t come to this realization until someone brings it to their attention or they discover it on their own.

A simple explanation of display advertising would be placing ads, preferably image ads, on other people’s websites. A classic example would be CNN.com or NewYorkTimes.com, but it could just as well be a trade association website or blog.

For most AdWords advertisers, their objective is direct response advertising and search is generally better for that than display. There are exceptions however. Such as when the desired response is an action a visitor to your website is willing to take (within the next 30 days of visiting your website), such as a relatively inexpensive purchase, a free download or sign-up. For example, I had a client who sold a $40 eBook and he did much better on the display network than he did in search because he could target his demographic better and the bar (cost of the eBook) was low enough.

When the objective is to build a relationship over time and you are unable to cause a conversion that can be tracked, it usually falls into what we call “branding”. This usually means you can’t make a direct correlation between the marketing expense and the desired action, such as a sale. You do it because you have faith it will help your overall bottom line. With display advertising, you are usually reaching prospects earlier in the buying cycle and therefore it is less likely they will take an action that can be tracked. Also, when it comes to conversion tracking, remember, the tracking cookie only lasts for 30 days.

Visitors from a search ad are “in the moment” and they are looking for a solution to a particular problem, an itch that needs scratching. Visitors from a display ad probably are not looking for any particular solution, they are simply reading about a related topic. This is why some call it “interruption marketing”. Ads need to be more compelling and that is one reason why image ads are more effective than text ads.

With that said, the display network is a powerful advertising and marketing tool that has become even more powerful recently due to the introduction of new features and tools. Successful internet marketers are paying a lot more attention and a lot more of their advertising budget on the display network. It is in many ways “the new frontier”.

The display network allows advertisers access to markets they otherwise would not have been able to target and do so with a better ROI than ever before. But there is a caveat. It requires a different set of skills, tools and is more time-consuming than search advertising, when done correctly. In many ways, display network advertising is a process of exclusion, not inclusion. The implication being that it requires more time to design, develop, create and fine-tune, before the campaign matures.

There are many aspects of search advertising that we take for granted. For example, we know going in, that Google.com is the premier search engine and if we advertise there, we will gain exposure to 60+% of the search market. Not so with display advertising, because choosing where your ad is displayed is a very big part of the process, and will have a huge impact on the success of your campaign. Knowing where to place your ads on the display network is critical and if you don’t invest the time to research and refine your placements (websites), you will probably not be happy with the results.

There are two methods of identifying websites to display your ads, these are called “Automatic Placements”, where you let Google decide and “Managed Placements”, where you decide. The astute advertiser uses both methods, but the process is quite different, yet both are tedious and time-consuming. This is the part of display advertising that requires considerably more resources than search advertising.

And we’re not done yet. Unless you use some of the advanced features of Google AdWords search, such as ad extensions, creating ads is as easy as writing three short lines of text. With display advertising, you not only have text ads, which are the least compelling of all the formats, but you have image ads, animated ads, video ads and gadget ads. Then, to make matters even more complicated, there are as many as eight different ad formats or sizes. And guess what, if you find a website you want to advertise on, you must have the ad format they allow in that specific spot on the page or your ad will not compete in the ad auction.

Let’s take it one step further. Let’s say you found the website you want to advertise on. You found a specific section of the website and the specific page where you think you can get the best ROI, and you have an image ad that fits the format. If you want to make it even more attractive, you should create an ad that is consistent with not only the topic being discussed, but the mood, tone and even the color scheme of the page. All of these tactics contribute to just how compelling your ad will be. Get it right and you win. Get it wrong and you lose.

So where to begin? First, decide if you are willing to invest in an experiment to determine if the display network will work for you. Unless you already have a successful display network campaign and you are simply looking to refine or enhance it, you should consider any resources you expend as a test. You will be testing the market. After all, that’s what successful marketers do, they test, test, test.

Every advertiser’s situation is different, but I’m going to attempt to generalize. If you are considering using my services to test the display network, you need to be prepared to invest a minimum of $3,000; 20-30 hours of my time and $1,000 – $2,000 in click charges. Let me be clear, that’s the minimum! But that’s not all. You also need to be prepared to get involved because there is only so much I can do on my own. After all, it’s your industry, your market, your business and your products. You know all of these much better than I do and when it comes to choosing websites to advertise on and developing ad copy, images mostly, it will be a collaborative process.

GDN advertising in general –

Pros

Reaches an audience that is not available on the search network

Can be a viable channel for seasoned or aggressive advertisers

Can work well when the product or the problem is difficult to describe in a few words

Can work well when an image or a video is more compelling than text

Remarketing, a form of GDN advertising, keeps you visible to visitors who already know you, but have not yet converted

Has the ability to produce conversions at a lower CPA than search

Increases brand awareness simply due to the number of impressions

Cons

Not for the tentative advertiser; someone who has limited resources, is not yet profitable or needing short-term results. Requires that the advertiser be willing to experiment.

Takes considerably more time and effort than search

Considerably more complex than search, requiring more knowledge

Can take much longer and cost more to produce results than search

It is not an exact science. Google uses a lot of its intuitive knowledge to reach users in a way that cannot be explained clearly, for example, where the user was before they were on the website where your ad just appeared.

High-level view of the process: Find good placements (websites), by focusing on conversions. This requires that you have accurate and reliable conversion tracking in place and that your conversion actions are something a first-time visitor would do if they had more than a casual interest in your product or service. The most common conversion action is to provide their first name and valid email address. You do not want to have a conversion action where the “bar” is too low or too high. An example of where the bar is too low would be to collect email addresses that have not been verified. An example of where the bar is too high is the purchase of a relatively expensive product.

Next, you want to have a good understanding of the various targeting methods, how they work and how you layer them to achieve your objectives. Here are the most common techniques:

Create a campaign using the best pre-determined techniques you can and let it run. Then prune placements based solely on CPA.

Pro/con: requires less work and can result in a big pay-off when you find those little-known placements that work really well, but can be expensive because of all the poor performing placements that have not yet reached the threshold for pruning.

Use extensive research to find relevant placements and let ads run throughout the sites (campaign #1; lower bid) and layer with keywords (campaign #2; 25% higher bid).

Pro/con: requires more up-front work, but results in less wasted ad spend. This method most often used by the tentative advertiser and this method will miss the opportunity to find that little-known placement that has the huge pay-off.

So now you’ve decided to invest in a market test. If you’re serious about testing, you’ll be prepared to create eight different sizes and maybe a couple of different layouts. Although we can begin by using a few text ads to start the research process, it really isn’t the best indication of whether you can be successful on the display network. Image ads are much more compelling and cannot only increase your CTR considerably, but can lead to a lower CPC, CPM and cost/conv.

Google allows the following file formats: gif, jpg, & swf, but recommends using “transparent .png”, with a maximum file size of 150kb and a maximum file name of 50 characters. For more information, please visit this page on the Google website.

Here are eight of the most popular physical configurations and their names:

Expect that this will be a process. I suggest we begin with one image ad of each size to increase the chances your ad will be shown. Using transparent PNG format images whenever possible. This can greatly improve the aesthetics and unique look of your ad. If you don’t have a transparent PNG image, make sure your ad color scheme matches the background of your images. If your image has a white background for example, consider setting your ad background to white.

Consider a customized landing page for visitors from the content network. Unlike visitors from search who tend to be page scanners, visitors from the display network tend to be page readers so give them more content on the landing page than you do for visitors from search.

Even if you haven’t decided to try remarketing yet, create a “Tag” for visitors to all your landing pages. Reason being, in order to enable a remarketing campaign, you must have identified a group of at least 100 visitors. How you structure the campaign can be determined at a later time. And while you’re at it, if you haven’t already placed Google Analytics code on your website, this would be a good time to do it.

What else can you do to get started? Well, remember how I explained that there were two methods of identifying websites to display your ads, “Automatic Placements”, where you let Google decide and “Manual Placements” where you decide? If you know of any website where you believe your prospect hangs out, please send me the URLs. I’ll check to see if they display ads by Google, but I’ll also look for similar websites.

Once you give me the go-ahead, I’ll also begin researching websites I think will be appropriate for your target market using a variety of different tools. When I get to an appropriate point in the process, I’ll ask for your help to determine if we use these websites in our “Managed Placements”. I’ll also create a campaign for “Automatic Placements” and let Google begin doing its thing to find websites for us. Once we have enough data, I’ll begin the process of fine-tuning. This involves excluding websites that are inappropriate and adding website that are working to the campaign of Managed Placements. There is a lot more to it than that, but I’ll take care of the details.

Okay, there you have it. What do you think? Are you ready to get started?
Want another perspective? Here is how Wikipedia defines display advertising.

Direct-response marketing has been around for over 100 years. Since the early days of mail-order catalogs. Pre-internet direct-response marketers were at the mercy of the postal system and the placement of “inquiry cards” appearing in catalogs or magazines. The cycle time for feedback on things such as ad copy, graphics or item popularity was measured in months.

Conversion tracking is arguably the single most important feature of search engine marketing, simply because of how much it reduces the time it takes to receive feedback on many important aspects of the search engine marketing selling process; keywords, search terms, ad copy, landing pages, website features and functions, etc.

Most novice AdWords advertisers view conversion tracking as a nifty feature and not as an essential tool for optimizing campaign performance. I won’t say that conversion tracking is always necessary, but there is almost always some value to be gained by implementing some basic functionality. If you aren’t willing to consider making conversion tracking a top priority, then you aren’t serious about optimizing your AdWords account! If you hire a professional to manage your AdWords account and you don’t have accurate, reliable conversion tracking in place, you have significantly hampered their ability to make significant improvements in your AdWords campaign.

My analysis of your AdWords account, whether it is before you retain me or after, will be focused in large part on conversion tracking. How I create and manage your account is highly dependent on whether conversion tracking is in place, working properly and tracks actions that are a meaningful part of the engagement process. Without reliable conversion tracking data, it’s like throwing something “over the fence” and hoping it hits the target.

The process of optimizing an AdWords campaign is about knowing what works and what doesn’t. You want to focus on and promote what works and filter or pay less for what doesn’t. Conversion tracking is a valuable tool to help you do that. At the end of an evaluation period, you may see an increase or decrease in the number of leads or sales, but if we are unable to track these actions back to a keyword and search query, it will be more difficult to know what to adjust.

If your objective for hiring me is to simply increase traffic to your website, without concern for the quality of traffic, then don’t worry about conversion tracking. On the other hand, if your objective is to increase the amount of profit, then we need to begin the engagement talking about conversion tracking. Because if we don’t select or create meaningful actions visitors can take on your website that tell us they are interested in what you offer, you have significantly reduced my ability to optimize your account and increased the amount of time it will take to make substantive improvements.

As advertisers, we can’t control what prospects search for. We can only try to influence what they see when they perform a search. It does little good to optimize your website or build an AdWords campaign for terms prospects don’t use or don’t use often enough. Therefore, our first task is to identify what users search for, how often and then match that to what you want to promote.

There will always be more traffic than you can afford to buy. Therefore, we need to determine where is that “fine line” that determines what we display ads for and what we filter out? When I review an account’s history, I try to determine what has been working and what hasn’t. If there is little or no conversion tracking data, it just makes the process more difficult and take longer.

If you believe the nature of your business and the way you engage with prospects doesn’t lend itself to AdWords conversion tracking. Or if you believe designing, developing, implementing and managing website functionality that uses conversion tracking is not worth the investment required. Then you may be at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to optimizing your AdWords campaign.

AdWords conversion tracking is free and relatively easy to set up, assuming you have an appropriate action that is a meaningful part of the selling process that a visitor will take within 30 days. Here is a short YouTube video on how to set up conversion tracking in your AdWords account.

I often find that an advertiser has all the right conditions for implementing conversion tracking, but simply hasn’t done it, for one reason or another. If they would allow me to take the time to help them implement conversion tracking before working on their campaigns, I would. The sooner you begin collecting conversion tracking data, the better.

Even with all its advantages, conversion tracking is not perfect and should be used to analyze trends and not an exact representation of every action taken on your site. More specifically, it will not work correctly if:

The visitor does not accept cookies

The visitor deletes their cookies

The visitor does not have Java enabled in their browser

The visitor takes the action more than 30 days after clicking on the ad

The Java script tracking code is not placed on the page properly

The visitor gets “cookied” using one computer and converts or takes the action on another computer.

Even with these caveats, it’s usually well worth the time, effort and expense.

Now that you have a better appreciation for the value of and limitations of conversion tracking, let’s peel the onion back a bit further.

Because conversion tracking typically uses a 30-day cookie, cost/conv data for any given keyword on any given day will change based on newly registered conversions. Here is something for you to think about. If you want to know the effect a change you make today has on cost/conv, you need to wait at least sixty days and then look back thirty days. Otherwise you will be dealing with incomplete and misleading data.

You need to resist evaluating a new keyword based on short-term data. Also keep in mind that the number of impressions and clicks can vary considerably from day-to-day. You must be willing to have the necessary confidence, commitment and patience or you should not be doing this.

Depending on your market, conversion tracking data can increase many fold over the life of the cookie, as visitors return to your site (from non-AdWords links) and convert. I make the distinction, “from non-AdWords links”, such as a bookmark, organic listing or website referrals, because AdWords attributes the conversion to the last-clicked ad, keyword and search term, even if the keyword or ad is paused.

I make the point about paused keywords because you will continue to register conversions in your account from keywords in your old campaigns, which may be paused, and you probably won’t be looking at those keywords when we launch a new ad group or campaign(s).

One more thing. In the case where the action being tracked is something which can vary in quality, such as a completed contact form, it’s important to have a feedback mechanism so that the person receiving the completed form can provide feedback to those designing the form and those responsible for evaluating the performance of the advertising campaign. Unfortunately, all too often these forms are completed by overly aggressive marketers or individuals seeking employment. I have some clients who include me in the distribution of the completed form so I can monitor the quality of the leads and provide suggestions for improving performance.

One of my favorite phrases when it comes to technology in general, but especially when it comes to the Google AdWords quality score is “The more you know, the more you don’t know”. Quality score is a black hole that never ends and keeps changing.

To gain an appreciation for quality score, I recommend that that you begin by viewing two brief, but very informative YouTube videos. The first one covers the basic concept and the other is titled Introduction to the Google Ad Auction. They are both very well done.

Depending on your level of interest, I have compiled a list of additional resources, which I think you will find informative. They include targeted sections from the AdWords Help Center, as well as some outside resources I’ve compiled.

As it relates specifically to customized landing pages, here are a few best practices:

Have the keyword in the landing page URL.

Keyword rich meta tags for:

Title tag

Description tag

Keyword tag

Image alt tags

Strive for a keyword density of 2-3%, but don’t sacrifice salesmanship in the process

Avoid

Pop-ups

Opt-in forms

Auto-play audio

Make sure the landing page loads quickly (load time). I don’t recommend using a blog as a landing page because it takes too long to load and may have a lot of external links that lead the visitor away.

Generate incoming links to your site with the keyword phrase in the anchor text. This isn’t absolutely required, but will help in competitive markets. Some ideas for getting a few incoming links quickly are submitting articles with your link in the resource box, post comments on blogs in your market, and link from your other sites.

If you have several landing pages which have a lot of duplicate content, don’t put them on your navigational structure, place them in a sub-directory. If you are concerned about the possibility of duplicate content from an SEO perspective, use an appropriate “no index” script.

Make sure there is no code on the page that prevents the Google bot (AdsBot-Google) from spidering the page

Prominent links to

Privacy policy

Terms of use

Any disclaimer

Contact us and include:

Company business name

Street address

Phone number

A real person’s name is also helpful

An escape to the main body of the website

Make sure Google is interpreting the site as the intended category, (the correct site genre). Check this with the Google external keyword tool and type in your website, then note the categories on the left side.

Get a couple quality inbound links to the site that are from related types of categories and make sure the hyper-text is the keyword you are optimizing for.

Have a couple of outbound links to authority sites with a page rank of at least 4. Websites with a .org tend to be good because they tend to be authority sites, but not competitive.

Create a blog in a separate directory on your website with a link to the blog on every page. Continually update the blog with fresh, relevant content. However, do not use the blog as a landing page because there may be too many outbound links.

Now, here is a real pearl of wisdom that trumps almost everything I’ve said. I have found that the overriding factor in a keyword quality score is “how that keyword has performed throughout the Google system”. This is a direct quote from Google, which they understate.

Therefore, if you have a relatively short, broad keyword such as “divorce attorney”, it is going to be very difficult to have a decent quality score. By decent I mean 7 or higher. In fact, it will be nearly impossible. The implementation of the quality score metric is Google’s way of not only insuring relevance for the user, but it’s a profit dial for Google because they can control how much an advertiser must pay to compete by simply manipulating the quality score algorithm.

If you plan to promote your website using Google AdWords you need to be mindful of how Google is evolving their policies because it can have a significant impact on your ROI. By ROI I mean what you pay Google in click charges verses what you get back in the way of business.

I created this post with the intention of educating you, the business owner. I realize that at some point in reading this, it will be beyond your technical knowledge. The rest of it, the stuff that is over your head, is for your web developer. I suggest you consider making this part of the statement of work (SOW) between you and your web developer.

Gone are the days of long-tail keywords, one-page sales letters, squeeze pages, vanity URLs and those black hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. These changes are already having a significant impact on the Information Marketing and Affiliate Marketing industries. Google is rapidly evolving their quality score algorithm to be more SEO like. SEO is the way you get your website found through organic or natural search.

There are two things to be aware of.

If you or your web developer uses any black hat techniques for the purposes of SEO, Google could blacklist your site, your company and possibly even YOU, from appearing on Google ever again. Your entire business or any business you create in the future could be affected. Whatever short-term gains you might get are not worth the long-term penalties you might be subject to. Besides, you would only be prolonging the inevitable anyway.

Google has been quietly rolling out their new policies over the past couple of years. But every so often, they stop simply suggesting and start enforcing. Those of us in the business call it a Google slap! When that happens, some people have a very rude awakening and their online business takes a nosedive.

If you want to achieve the best possible ROI from your AdWords campaign, then there are certain things you need to do as a business owner and certain things your web developer needs to keep in mind as they create and maintain your website.

As a business owner, you need to specify the overall architecture, feature and function of your website. Web developers need to make sure the site is designed, developed and implemented to Google’s specifications, for the purpose of optimizing for AdWords.

When it comes to having the best possible ROI using AdWords, it’s all about relevance. Relevance means having tightly themed ad groups with highly relevant ad copy, with relevant landing page copy that is consistent with the rest of your website.

One of the major factors in determining what you pay per click and your ads ranking in the search results is known as landing page quality score. Most of these factors have to do with what you actually say on the landing page, how transparent you are and how easy it is to navigate your website. Rarely should you be sending prospects from a PPC campaign to your website home page, but sometimes it is appropriate.

Some of the aspects of landing page quality, as well as the overall website design, will be handled by the web developer. This usually depends on how knowledgeable you are about website design and the actual Google policies. In any case, you should make your web developer aware of Google’s webmaster guidelines so there will be no misunderstandings.

Now that you have an idea for the dos and don’ts, let’s come at this from a different angle so we increase the chances of maximizing your ROI. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to insure that your website is not what’s holding you back when it comes to getting the most from your AdWords campaign, and in fact, is what sets you apart from your competition.

Don’t expect your web developer to be your chief marketing strategist. They are typically graphic artists and technical geeks, not marketers. Most websites I see for small to medium-sized businesses are little more than online brochures. However, in fairness to their web developer, that’s probably exactly what the business owner asked for. I myself am a combination career marketing professional and part technical geek, but not a web developer. Just what you might expect for someone who does what I do.

Remember what I said earlier about relevance? Well, let’s peel back the onion a bit and see what that really means. Ideally, Google would like a user (your prospect) to perform a search using a query phrase that describes what it is they are looking for. They would see your ad with the actual query phrase they used in the headline of your ad. They would click on your ad because it was the clearest and most compelling ad on the page, and they were deposited at your landing page. The landing page would be all about the thing they were searching for and the rest of your website would have lots of relevant information about the topic they were interested in. And because your website was so great and packed with all kinds of relevant stuff, they would never have a need to search for that thing ever again. That is what Google would call the perfect user experience! I also discuss the topic of relevance in my post titled A chain of success.

Now let’s get specific. What are the things you need to do to insure your visitor has the best user experience, you maximize your landing page quality score and you still have a website that sells! Here are some suggestions:

The website development application. I’m getting a little out of my league here, but hopefully this will make sense. If you are like many of my clients, small business owners who want the ability to create and update content on your site without having to call your webmaster or learn a website development tool like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, then I suggest you work with a developer who will build your website with this in mind. Content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress could be just the ticket. FLASH sites are old news and will not work well with AdWords because the AdWords bot cannot interpret FLASH code.

Have a clear navigation structure. It’s OK to have pages that are off the navigation structure as long as the navigation structure is on every page and you don’t lead visitors down a dead-end path.

Landing pages specifically designed for each product or line of products if appropriate. Have the primary keyword as part of the “h1” tag on every product page. Have enough content on the landing page to reinforce the relevance to your ad and have a 2-3% keyword density for that keyword.

Make sure your meta tags conform to Google’s best practices; tags for <title>, <description> and <keyword>. There are format and length specification to be aware of. Here is a link to a nice little tutorial on the importance of meta tags.

Make sure all your images have what are called “alt tags”. This allows the search engine spiders to know what the image is. If you can describe the image in a way that is relevant to your topic, it helps your quality score.

Many successful online marketers will tell you that their most important asset is a quality email list for clients and prospects, which he/she has cultivated a good relationship with. There are several techniques you can use to build your list, but for the purpose of website development I recommend you have several “give-to-gets” and you capture visitor information using a good autoresponder like www.1shoppingcart.com or www.aweber.com.

If you do implement an autoresponder or any other form that collects personal information, it is essential that you also provide a privacy policy that discloses how the information will be used and that you give options to limit the use of a user’s personal information, such as the ability to opt out of receiving regular emails.

Become an expert on the topic your product or service is about. Have articles, preferably ones you created and published, product reviews and opinions. The more relevant content the better and it must be unique. Make sure it has a human voice to it and that you use the keywords you want to optimize for repeatedly throughout the document and don’t simply copy something from another website, Google will know and discount your quality score.

Whenever possible, avoid FLASH. Here are two reasons, 1) search engines spiders (the little programs that read your website and decide how good it is) can’t understand FLASH, it looks like a big blob to them. 2) FLASH does not SELL, it distracts the visitor! It’s wizzy and cool and web developers love to do stuff in FLASH, but it distracts the visitor from that one thing that is the entire purpose of your website. Get the visitor to do what you want them to do. Fill out a form, download a whitepaper, call you on the phone or how about this, buy something! With that said, FLASH does have its place when it comes to instructional or entertainment applications.

Have a blog. One of the best things you can do to improve your quality score is to have fresh, unique, relevant content. That’s exactly what having a blog will do.

If you sell something on the site, have a page which clearly states your terms.

Have an About Us page. Let visitors know there is a real person at the other end of the internet. Have a real physical address, a real person’s name and a phone number with a real person on the other end that is helpful in ways other than simply qualifying leads.

Google is bringing more and more of the organic search criteria into the pay-per-click (AdWords) side of their business. Years ago, ranking was all about what was on your web pages; proper use of meta tags, keyword density and other “on-page” characteristics. Today, page ranking is 80% “off-page” and only 20% on-page. Off-page means, who is linking to your site and how highly their site is ranked. If their site is ranked higher than your site, it pulls you up in the ranking and increases your quality score. If you think about it, it’s just like relationships in the real world. If you know popular and influential people then you become more popular and influential yourself.Whether you need to consider the time and expense of creating quality in-bound links will be determined by your current keyword and landing page quality scores. In many cases, the quality scores will be heavily influenced by the amount of competition for that keyword. If the keyword is relatively unique and has relatively little search volume, chances are you will not need to invest in in-bound links. On the other hand, if the keyword is quite broad and there is a lot of competition, having lots of high-quality in-bound links is one way you can increase your quality score and differentiate yourself from the competition.

In a perfect world, the words you use to describe your product or service would be exactly how people search for it online and your website would use those same words and phrases. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually happen. Website developers and traditional media advertisers who have experience developing advertising copy; brochures, articles, advertisements, believe they can use the same vocabulary that worked for traditional media when they build web pages for visitors from search engines. But that can be a costly mistake!

Achieving a truly optimized search engine advertising campaign goes beyond the elements of your PPC campaign, such as keywords, bid prices, ad copy, etc. It also includes how you design your website, the use of custom landing pages, the words you use on your landing pages and the rest of your website.

Many advertisers, including myself, at one time designed their website from the inside-out. In other words, how they see themselves in the market or how they see the market niche they are in. Instead of from the outside-in, meaning how visitors from search engines think and what they actually search for. The inside-out approach may work fine for prospects from other channels or existing customers. However, visitors from search engines are a unique kind of prospect. They may be somewhat naive about the topic they are interested in. They can also become overwhelmed or confused by the variety of content for what they thought was a very specific topic. They can also be quite cynical and usually have very little patience.

The way you have designed your website may make perfect sense to you, your existing customers and even industry pundants. However, if it doesn’t relate well to how prospects from search engines actually search for what you offer, what I call the search vocabulary of your market, then your campaign will be far from optimal.

There are two important reasons why you need to be aware of this. The first has to do with what prospects are thinking when they use a search engine. The second has to do with how the Google AdWords game is played. Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

If you haven’t already done so, this would be a good time to pause and read my article titled A chain of success and the subsequent linked articles.

If the way you describe your product or service and the keywords you use to build your campaign, do not match how prospects search for what you offer, you will not only limit your exposure to real prospects, but if they do manage to reach your landing page and you do not use their search vocabulary, you will have created what we call friction. It would be as if you were having a conversation with someone with a very heavy foreign accent. For example, you may advertise yourself as a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist. However, when real people with real problems search online, they are more likely to use words like therapy, counseling or help. If you don’t take this into consideration when building your campaign, you will be missing out on the biggest segment of your target market. If your landing page does not quickly and efficiently alter their thought process and bring them around to your way of thinking, you will have missed the opportunity to engage with a legitimate prospect. When a visitor from a search engine lands on your website for the first time, you have 3-5 seconds to make a connection. If you don’t, they will bounce!

When you think of using PPC advertising, whether it’s Google AdWords or Bing™Ads, you must understand that there are rules that manifest themselves in the form of a quality score. These quality scores are a way of incentivizing or punishing you for being relevant or speaking the same language as the search engine user and the search engine’s robot. If your keyword, ad copy, landing page and website do not speak the same language as your visitor, you will not only pay a hefty penalty in the form of a higher CPC, but your ad may not display for a significant number of real prospects!

If you think about the process I discuss in the A chain of success, article it is possible to pull the prospect around to your way of thinking and not break the chain, but you need to be very careful. Keywords and keyword matching options, especially negative keywords will insure that your ad only displays for the right suspects. Proper ad copy can perform a valuable translation and qualifying function. Custom landing pages, if designed properly, will keep a qualified prospect engaged long enough for you to pull them into your sales process.

When you have the benefit of historical data in your AdWords and Analytics accounts, you are on your way to learning what I call the search vocabulary of your market. On the other hand, if you are just beginning your online advertising experience and you have built your website with little or no knowledge of your market’s search vocabulary, you are at a distinct disadvantage. It means you will essentially have to buy this knowledge. By this I mean you will have to learn it over time, at some expense by buying clicks in order to capture the data. There is no keyword tool in existence that can compare with a rich search term history from your own website, AdWords or Analytics account.

Where you stand in relation to the processes I’ve discussed will determine where you are along the path to having a truly optimized PPC campaign.

Having a successful AdWords campaign is all about managing your ROI. This means maximizing your exposure for relevant search queries and minimizing your exposure for poor quality searches that result in unwanted clicks.

I often review AdWords accounts where a lot of the ad spend has been consumed by relatively poor quality clicks. In most cases, it’s due to what I call The broad match effect. This is where Google displays your ad for synonyms of a broad-matched keyword that you never anticipated and would not have allowed if you knew you had paid for it.

Maximizing your exposure means choosing the right keywords and keyword matching options. Minimizing your exposure to poor quality search queries is also accomplished by carefully selecting keywords and keyword matching options, but also complementing them with an extensive list of negative keywords. This activity is what separates the novice from the professional AdWords campaign manager. To explain the details of how this is done, would be to explain how Google’s algorithm works. This has taken me several years to learn and it’s always changing. Google’s algorithm is their secret sauce and they are never going to tell us exactly how it works.

Poor quality search queries must be blocked from triggering your ad and causing an impression. Having too many impressions and not enough clicks, creates a low Click-Through-Rate (CTR). Low CTR creates low Quality Scores and low quality scores result in higher Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and lower Impression Share. When your existing campaign has a history of low impression share, it means that your ad isn’t displaying for some of your best prospects. Low impression share results from having a daily budget that is too low or ads appearing too low in the ranking.

It is possible to filter most of the obvious poor quality traffic by analyzing account history, assuming there is enough history, and by using various keyword tools. However, when that layer of poor traffic is peeled away, it only exposes another layer of offenders, hence my selecting the title “Peeling the onion”.

This situation exists when:

There are only one or two words that form the core phrase of keywords that describe your product or service.

There are a very large number of complementary words that significantly reduce the quality of the visitor / click.

My first pass at identifying and implementing negative keywords will be done early in the process of me understanding your business. Therefore, it will probably take several “peels of the onion” to ultimately optimize your account. My ability to maximize your ROI is proportional to:

The time I have to work on your account (the research and fine-tuning process) and

the level of cooperation I get from you, the business owner or manager.

It’s important to understand that this is an iterative process and no one ever gets it exactly right the first time. It simply underscores the importance of what I call fine-tuning a new campaign or ad group once it has been launched.

There are two factors that will make a considerable difference in how long the process takes and how efficient the process will be. One is conversion tracking, the other is website analytics.

Conversion tracking allows us to tie a search term and keyword to your desired action, such as filling out a contact form. However, if your most desired action is a phone call, this presents another challenge. See my article titled Telephone conversions.

By using custom reports in Google Analytics, we can determine how well a keyword and search query are performing based on things such as; bounce rate, number of pages visited and average time spent per page. After analyzing this data, we can make further adjustments to keywords, matching options ad copy and bid prices.

Here is another important aspect of maximizing ROI. Some of your keywords need to be in the top positions, while others should be further down the ranking, depending on how valuable the query is to your business. In order to do this properly, I will need to have a good understanding of your market, your competition, your business and your products and/or services.

One last thing I want to point out. A search term that you paid $1 for with a broad match keyword, may cost you $5-10 when you specifically target that term with a more restrictive keyword matching option. That’s the downside. The upside is, your ad will now display for that term a lot more often (Impression Share), and you will have more control over where your ad appears on the page (ad rank). Once you have control of the term, you can create ad copy and landing pages that are much more relevant, which will increase your conversion rate. A higher Conversion Rate and a lower Cost-Per-Conversion is the key to maximizing your ROI in Google AdWords.